A book that changed me

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As part of our "A Book That Changed Me" series,
writers have told us about a book, pamphlet or essay which had a big
impact on them, changing their thinking, or even their life.

Now it's your turn. We want you to tell us about writing that left a lasting impression on you. Did it change your outlook on life, or offer you some comfort and clarity in a difficult period? What books have helped form you as a person?

We're looking for 150-200 words on a book that changed you, with a photo of your copy of the book, however dog-eared. We'll publish our favourites on Comment is free, and you can read through other users' contributions throughout the summer.

Every book I have read has influenced my life, but a book that changed my future was Hopscotch by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar.

I was 15 years old when I found Hopscotch in my house library and I was drawn to open it by the chalk hopscotch on its cover. Wondering what a book with that name could be about, l discovered that it could be read in two different ways. One, starting at chapter one and finishing in chapter 57. Or the other starting at chapter 73 and following the order shown at the end of every chapter. Now I was intrigued.

The following year I couldn’t stop reading its pages. Even acquiring the habits of the characters. Like Horacio’s superstition that you have to lift an object that falls to the floor immediately before a person whose name starts with the first letter of the object suffers a misfortune. Or trying to be like La Maga, absorbed and distracted.

Half of Hopscotch is in Paris, a city that I had never been to or even dreamed of. After reading this book I knew I had to go there and discover the bohemian Paris depicted by Cortázar.

Two years later, after I finished high school, I was on a twelve-hour flight from my home country Colombia to France with the aim of walking through the same bridges and boulevards where Horacio and La Maga loved and lost each other.

This book changed my life because I had never read anything that described in such detail some of the emotions I have experienced in my own life. Dave Eggars allowed me to truly empathise, laugh and cry, while also experiencing a huge dose of hope about the fact that no matter what we experience in life, life simply goes on. Turning grief into an epic tale crossing fantasy and reality resonated with my own need to allow the grief of two parents who passed away when I was 16 years old become a comfortable part of my identity. Thanks Dave Eggars!

The book Death of a Naturalist, a collection of Seamus Heaney's early poems, changed a great deal for me in that it was the first book of poems I read over and over again, and it made me aware of the power of poetry both at a private and political level. Death of a Naturalist also showed that an Irish poet could break into other markets, particularly the English market, with poetry written about the everyday, mainly-rural world of 1970s Ireland. In the South of Ireland we identified with Seamus Heaney and his writing not just because the poems were beautifully crafted but also because his work, and the writing of other northern poets, struck a positive and courageous note in dark, troubled times.

While later books he published, such as North and The Haw Lantern, were possibly of a higher and more lasting quality, the freshness, energy and self-confidence of Death of a Naturalist make it a book I will always treasure for the influence it had on me at a certain time in my life. The groundbreaking nature of Death of a Naturalist should also not be forgotten when assessing the strength of Irish writing since its publication in 1966.

Here in Budapest, listening to the tributes to Seamus Heaney on the morning of his passing, I recall his friendliness, humour and warmth one wet winter's evening in Munich when I asked him to sign The Haw Lantern for me. There was something very special not only about Death of a Naturalist, but also about Seamus himself too.

Just discovering this book existed was a breath of fresh air for me, I felt like the hand round my throat had loosened a little bit; suddenly I was allowed to exist. In a world where already being “black” or “woman” is to be oppressed and subjugated, but when the “black” experience means the black male and when “woman” means white, where does this leave the black woman? You grow up feeling like you have to choose a fight, racism or sexism, which ignores the intersection and therefore denies your existence. Your unique experience is marginalized by white men, white women and black men; you truly feel your status as not just the lowest rung but not having a rung at all. hooks reveals how these structures were carefully put into place and actively maintained. She puts a spotlight on the black woman’s experience, with her voice blowing away the dust from its continual neglect. This book changed my life because I no longer felt invisible and insignificant. It spoke the thoughts I’d repressed for fear I was wrong, because I’d never heard them before. This book helped me realise not only that I had a voice, but that I had a loud one.

Unfortunately it was not until later on in my life that I got interested in this topic. The ideas which came with this text had the power to influence many of my decisions so that I can claim that "Microeconomics" by Pindyck and Rubinfeld is a real "Lifechanger". It delivered a special kind of spectacles which, on the one hand helped me in increasing my options, and on the other hand left me better off.

A combination of Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence and Richard Hoggart's Uses of Literacy change me when read in the winter of 1969. In both it was the issue facing me as I grew up with a working class father and a mother from a declining middle class family, a father who had no interest in the arts and a mother who encouraged us to read. Paul Morel seemed a perfect match while the chapter called "The Uprooted and the Anxious" in Hoggart allowed me to confront the difficulties I was facing as I moved out of my class and area, eventually to become a rather rootless academic. They've supported me ever since.

I've always been critical but curious about religion, unable to believe but still wanting to. While Greene is just considered 'pop' fiction, by some, he was able to capture and relate much of my adolescent mind generations before I was even born. The End of the Affair is a perfect exercise in the human struggle for love, acceptance, and destiny. The most genuine of affections become strained when blended with shades of sexual and spiritual desire. Most of all though, it taught me that time is painful. The inevitability and frustration within this novel stay with me.

I won't deny it wasn't the beautiful cover which made me choose (what turned out to be) a gorgeous little novella. Always fascinated by an unusual premise, this book tells the story of one hot summer night in a small town in Connecticut, and the extraordinary events which take place. A beautiful mannequin leaves her shop window and comes to life, once loved dolls become animated, a phantom lover and chance meetings with the strangest characters in the dead of night. So beautifully written with wonderfully colourful characterisations, I read the 113 pages one night and couldn't put it down until it was done. It felt like I'd had a very unusual dream.

That overactive imagination I developed in childhood went into overdrive and reignited my love of all things mysterious and impossible. Enchanted Night influenced my own writing, producing short stories with dark undertones and unusual twists. For a long time afterwards, a lit shop window would make me stop and stare. Just in case I saw a flicker of life in those plastic people.

Having been born in 1947, i was a baby boomer and studied Animal Farm at GCE level in a Secondary Modern school for boys. My background is working class and we lived in a council house at that time and whilst I knew my parents voted Labour had not really bothered to find out why. This changed when I read the book and with the subtle pressure and gudiance from my teachers have been a committed left winger all my life - although not necessarily via the current Labour Party!

Gabriel (the angel) said to Mary (the virgin), "you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son..." and Mary asked "how can this be, since I do not know a man?". The virgin birth was an event that I had accepted not only as historical fact but as exclusive to Christianity. However after reading "Myths to Live By", I realized that "there are myths of and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections;Second Comings, Judgements and the rest, in all the great traditions". Carefully "dividing asunder" myth and religion with deep insight and erudition,Campbell gave me a fresh outlook.

"'Factualised' truths of science" replaced "old mythic notions of the cosmos", and revealed grandeur that infinitely surpassed the "toy-room picture" of the Bible. I followed Professor Campbell on a thrilling journey into the world of myths as he charmingly explicated the symbolic and psychological importance of the Oriental and Occidental versions of these myths. Like Keats said of Chapman's Homer "I heard", Campbell "speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like a watcher of the skies when some new planet swims into his ken".

Of course there cannot be only one book. Le long voyage (The long voyage) by Semprun and all the books by Antoine de Saint-Exupery marked me in their retelling of wartime stories with an immense humanity. Semprun's book tells of the horror of the train ride towards Buckenwald, humans treated like cattle. Saint-Exupery wrote during wartime uplifting books of hope and the beauty of life.

I was 11, on holiday and out with my mother in the heat of a Malaysian afternoon, when we entered a darkened little shop. It was stuffed with a motley collection of things. Peering into a glass case, I saw a faded book with a drawing of a snarling dog on its cover. It was The Hound of the Baskervilles. There was something alluring about that dreadful drawing. I returned to our holiday home, sank into a red leather chair and devoured the book. The lonely moor, the legend of the hound, the escaped convict, the missing boot and the family resemblance in the portrait which gave Sherlock the final clue, catapulted me into a world of mysteries, which were unraveled by quiet, methodical deduction. When I demanded more Sherlock, my mother shrugged and said we had the entire collection at home! Returning from our holiday, I flew to the bookshelves and found the collection, bound in red. This treasure trove led to a lifelong love of detectives, from Marple, Poirot and Father Brown to Maigret, Dexter and Sarah Lund. The red binding of the Sherlock collection is now worn, its pages as thin and fragile as a medieval manuscript.

The southern U.S. observed through the eyes of a child. I recognized myself in the isolation and yearning of Mick Kelly, That book along with William Faulkner's Light in August and Harper Lee's To kill a mocking bird, made me love the South, with its humanity, its courage and hardships and the richness of its characters. A place too easy to caricature nowadays and I believe misunderstood.

Read as an idealistic young woman, it is the reason I will always be left-leaning in my politics. Science-fiction written in 1887, a voyage through time, it looks at a utopia of equality and socialism in the year 2000. I loved the idea. We are so far from it though...

I was first introduced to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Korso et al during my undergraduate excesses in the late nineties. The obvious route into Kerouac's spontaneous prose style was "On the Road" however I felt much more connected to Jack's periodic loneliness (I put it down to being so flagrantly misunderstood and eons ahead of his time) through his time spent as a fire watcher on a remote mountaintop.

Perhaps it was his enforced isolation that gave rise to such a sense of disconnection and introspective thinking. Whatever the source, this book is in my opinion the finest example of Kerouac's be-bop prosody twinned with an archane ode to the American dream.

Ever the wanderer, ever the dharma bum. I've re-read it several times and it never fails to move me.

This book was first published in December 1962 when I was 16 and doing 'O' level studies at a comprehensive school in Wolverhampton. However, I did not read it until August 1996 when I was 49 and doing doctoral studies at the OU.

Why did a book I had not read change me?

Briefly, because, in August 1967, when I was studying architecture, I received a copy of Cedric Price's Potteries Thinkbelt study, but something I did not know then was that it was a response to the challenge originated by Buckminster Fuller in Education Automation, namely, that the world's universities should invest in the problem of how to make the world work for 100% of humanity. This challenge had been ignored in the UK, prompting Price, famous for Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace, to design another early entry project, this time in the field of social policy. Further, in August 1996, I learned that Price's proposal that advanced education should become the new prime industry was a re-think of Fuller's original conception. Thus Education Automation is a book that changed Cedric Price before it changed me. Why? Ultimately, because it frees us all to return to our studies.

I am a bit embarrassed to admit that it took me a while to get around reading The Selfish Gene. It was not until the summer after my first year of studying biology at university that I began making my way through the book. At that time, evolution was already making strong progress at replacing football as the obsession of my life, but when I finished the book the transition was complete. The book changed my life not because it taught me any new facts (indeed, it includes very few real examples) but because it taught me how to think. Dawkins’ gene’s-eye view and its vision of the history of life as a struggle of competing replicators remains not only an unrivalled introduction to the logic of Darwinian evolution, but it is still also the most enthralling. Of all books on evolution I have read since, and, halfway through a doctorate on the subject, there are many, it is the one book I return to. And it is the first book I recommend to anyone curious about what I do. After all, having read it, I could imagine no other career than as an evolutionary biologist.